Aaron Siego of KDE: "It would be very nice if our X server could use OpenGL directly for its display and composition. Because then we could have hardware accelerated effects that are not only cool looking, but also very useful. Well, there is just such a project underway, called XGL. But don't hold your breath. The development of XGL has been largely removed from the community and is being done behind closed doors. Who is this company, you ask, that would take the development of something as potentially important as this out of the community and put it behind closed doors? Novell."

Go read the MIT license. MIT is more free than the GPL. It basically says you can do anything you want to the code -- print it on toliet paper or keep it secret. There is no viral requirement to share your source.

If you can legally get your hands on MIT licensed code you can redistribute it all you want without asking permission of the original author. The key part is that Novell has to agree to release the code in the first place, you can't force it out of them like the GPL lets you do.

Ubuntu aready distrbutes a lot of MIT licensed code since the whole current X server family is MIT licensed.